Nice is different than good: Al Mohler and Little Red Riding Hood

Civility does not mean, primarily, being nice. It means, foremost, being honest.

Without a shared commitment to truth, there can be no civility.

Pretending that one is trying to be nice while dripping with condescension and scorn is not compatible with civility. Particularly when this faux-politeness is all in the service of distorting another’s words — creating a mocking effigy of their argument, then criticizing that effigy for being so crudely drawn.

The great thing about the evangelical subculture is that you can get away with this counterfeit pseudo-civility and you will almost never be called out on it. As long as you imitate the form of civility, you’ll never be required to live up to its meaning or substance. And you can make a very nice living distorting what other people say, corroding the very possibility of civil discourse, all while pretending you’re being a nice person and a polite person.

All of which is to say that the disingenuous, condescending piffle Al Mohler uses to sand down the sharp corners of his dishonest hatchet-job on Rob Bell will never be mistaken for an example of civility.

“Nice is different than good,” Stephen Sondheim said.

Mohler’s disdainful, scornful misrepresentation of Team Hell’s dissenters is neither. That is not what civility looks like.

Brian McLaren, being a more generous and patient person than I, provides a more generous and patient response to Mohler’s counterfeit civility. Although even McLaren gets a bit pointed toward the end:

To impugn our motives … to reduce our concerns about love and justice to sentimentality, to dismiss us with the “L” word and a questionable narrative surrounding it, and to demean as “secularized” our attempt to articulate a fresh vision of the gospel probably won’t pass muster as a fair hearing. …  I imagine Rob Bell feels a lot like I have on many occasions: it’s not that the critics have accurately understood what I’m trying to say and have explained why they disagree. It’s that they’ve misrepresented what I’m trying to say and have explained why the misrepresentation is audacious and ludicrous.